Top 100 Literate Quotes
#1. You should prefer a good scientist without literary abilities than a literate one without scientific skills
Leonardo Da Vinci
#2. I think my grandmother Woodrell was most responsible for my becoming a writer. She wasn't quite literate, but was very proud that she attended school as far as the third grade. She worked as a maid, housekeeper and cook.
Daniel Woodrell
#4. This is not an international thriller so much as a fiercely literate attempt to subvert the thriller genre itself.
Christopher Rice
#5. The World needs Educated Persons not the Literate Ones
Yarro Rai
#6. Subtle and literate, The Dance of Intimacy is like a long, revealing conversation with a wise and compassionate friend.
Maggie Scarf
#7. We have people who believe they are scientifically literate but, in fact, are not.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#8. I've never been to a shrink. But my parents were very psychologically literate - my father had undergone Freudian analysis - and we often talked about other people in psychological terms, so I picked up a lot of that.
Toby Young
#9. I have become very aware how under-represented are the stories of the underprivileged and undervalued. Our records are, in general, very male and if not always the material of the rich, certainly (for obvious reasons) the material of the literate.
Sara Sheridan
#10. I always prided myself on at least trying to be literate and use the right words, and if the audience didn't get it, then they could go home and look it up.
Tom Lehrer
#11. Where did you go to school?" Piers inquired. "Your all together too literate for a butler. Most bulters I know say things like as you wish, my lord, and leave it at that. Our conversations should be along these lines: Prufrock, bring me a wench and then you would say, as you wish.
Eloisa James
#12. People don't know the past, even though we live in literate societies, because they don't trust the sources of the past.
Daniel Pauly
#13. I feel quite confident that audiences on both sides of the Atlantic are growing 'dumber,' if what you really mean to say is 'less culturally literate.'
Terry Teachout
#14. An enlightened society is one where all people - the rich and the poor, the literate and the illiterate, the black and the white, men and women - live happily as children of the same Lord. Thus experiencing the brotherhood of men under the fatherhood of God.
Pandurang Shastri Athavale
#15. Mal Peet: "In terms of sustaining a literate and literary culture, the books we put into our children's hands are immeasurably more important than the latest works of high-profile novelists.
M.G. Harris
#16. The literate mind has sown the seeds of its own destruction through the creation of media that render irrelevant those "traditional skills" on which literacy rests.
Neil Postman
#17. I came from a classic, literate, intellectual Jewish family.
Lenny Abrahamson
#18. Music enhances the education of our children by helping them to make connections and broadening the depth with which they think and feel. If we are to hope for a society of culturally literate people, music must be a vital part of our children's education.
Yo-Yo Ma
#19. It is unwise to make something permanent when the whole world is shifting. There may be a time when this symbol means something treacherous and terrible, rather than something noble and literate.
Lemony Snicket
#20. I got out of difficult situations when many of my classmates didn't because I was smart, and I was lucky, and my parents were amazingly literate and helpful.
Kerry Greenwood
#21. I've always been an avid reader. Everyone in my family read a lot. Considering we were from a little town, we were pretty literate.
John Malkovich
#22. And then there are the subway readers of difficult books. I like to imagine that New Yorkers are more literate than the riders of other American metropolises.
Sari Botton
#23. Now there's a whole generation of filmmakers who grew up making their own films with video cameras, and have dined entirely on a diet of popular culture. It's been reflected in a lot of their work. It's self-reflective, it's quite knowing, but it's very literate.
Simon Pegg
#24. It is my conviction that the personality of the writer has nothing to do with the literate product of his mind. And publicity in this case embarrasses me because I am acutely conscious of how far short the book falls of the artistry I am struggling to achieve. It's like being caught half-dressed.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#25. There have always been literate ignoramuses who have read too widely and not well. The Greeks had a name for such a mixture of learning and folly which might be applied to the bookish but poorly read of all ages. They are all sophomores.
Mortimer J. Adler
#26. The Urban Literate Southern California Sub-Group of the Early Atomic Period has not yet produced a distinct body of folk music of its own.
Sam Hinton
#27. I don't see one as bring better or more literate than the other and there's a real buzz to not only writing about a character I love like Superman, but also writing something that kids can enjoy.
Mark Millar
#28. The age of the pulp magazine was the last in which youngsters, to get their primitive material, were forced to be literate.
Isaac Asimov
#29. One must always have in mind one simple fact - there is no literate population in the world that is poor, and there is no illiterate population that is anything but poor.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#30. All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life
John Cheever
#31. It may literally turn out that a Hottentot, an educated and literate Hottentot it is true, but one who is a member of a relatively primitive society, would be able to make bombs.
Herman Kahn
#32. Every literate woman is a victory over poverty
Ban Ki-moon
#33. In many ways, the ability to read is the great divide that separates the very young from everyone else. Once we've joined the conspiracy of the literate, once we've crossed over to the land of the reading, everything changes.
Patricia T. O'Conner
#34. The past is recorded almost exclusively in the voices of elites and males, in the viewpoints of the wealthy and the powerful, in the visions of the literate and the educated.
John Dominic Crossan
#35. Abraham had eight sons
not one. All eight sons bring something to the table. Abraham loved all of his sons. He was a good father who made sure all his sons were literate, of good character and shared a common ideology with their father, Abraham. Abraham did good. Where did we go wrong?
pg 54
Michael Ben Zehabe
#36. I'm delighted the world is becoming more mentally literate. A few decades ago, if you mentioned the word 'brain,' no one was interested. Now, nearly every magazine on the planet is featuring the brain. One of my original goals, on one level, was to make myself unnecessary.
Tony Buzan
#37. Bond people pose the same problem to a cultural anthropologist as a non-literate tribe deep in the Amazon. In
Michael Lewis
#38. Yeah. I do. I think that we have to continue to expand the areas in which we want our kids to be literate. And social media's going to be a part of their lives. And why not? Why not give them a sense of what the rules of the road are?
LeVar Burton
#39. The readership of Victorian novels, when they were published, was much less diverse. People were probably white, and had enough money to be literate. Very often, there are phrases in Italian, German and French that are left untranslated.
Eleanor Catton
#40. I guess the producers saw me and knew I was literate and I always tried to be alert and it's funny because you have to have a sharpness to do those shows, especially some of the ones I did in later years.
June Lockhart
#41. Guess what - I am one of the ONLY senators in the whole United States Senate that is computer literate!
Patty Murray
#42. You looked like a half-literate moron in that letter, like an anti-intellectual jackanapes trying to stampede his way into power with all the finesse of a lovestruck buffalo.
Patrick Ness
#43. I think we should see whether we are wise trying to educate everybody to a high standard the way we are trying to do now. There has to be a high level of education so everybody is literate, but whether university education is necessary for everyone is open to question.
Robertson Davies
#44. Look at self-satisfied pop singers or greasy, semi-literate athletes. People worship them. Why?"
"Because they're talented.
Anthony Horowitz
#45. I am not at all computer literate in real life. I haven't yet found a reason to be. Once I find a reason why I need to be on the Internet, then I will be.
John Travolta
#46. I understand that computers, which I once believed to be but a hermaphrodite typewriter-cum-filing cabinet, offer the cyber literate increased ability to communicate. I do not think this is altogether a bad thing, however it may appear on the surface.
David Mamet
#47. There ain't no grammatical errors in a non-literate society.
Marshall McLuhan
#48. All the old houses that I knew when I was a child were full of books, bought generation after generation by members of the family. Everyone was literate as a matter of course. Nobody told you to read this or not to read that. It was there to read, and we read.
Katherine Ann Porter
#49. Amelia is Jeremy's opposite. She's real. She's literate. I like her a lot. Or maybe I just like the idea of her. Because she's so young that she's out of the question, I can mentally make her into the Perfect Woman in Waiting. Is that what I'm doing?
Laura Buzo
#50. Style, not least, adds beauty to the world. To a literate reader, a crisp sentence, an arresting metaphor, a witty aside, an elegant turn of phrase are among life's greatest pleasures.
Steven Pinker
#51. I am quite unsatisfied by the distinctions between the oral and literate.
David Antin
#52. We were not taught financial literacy in school. It takes a lot of work and time to change your thinking and to become financially literate.
Robert Kiyosaki
#53. 'Rolling Stone' had started something called 'Outside,' and since I was one of two people in the office that liked going outside, I was pegged to work on it. The concept of the magazine was simple: literate writing about the out-of-doors. I jumped at the opportunity.
Tim Cahill
#54. I came out of my professional athlete career with a 450 credit score, no money in the bank to show for it, but I had an Ivy League degree. So I put that Dartmouth degree to good use and got a job on Wall Street. I hated it but used the time to make connections and become financially literate.
Brian J. White
#55. Even if you have to die tomorrow; die as a literate.
M.F. Moonzajer
#56. The Vikings certainly didn't write anything about themselves; it was not a literate, but rather a pagan, culture. So what we get was written later by Christian monks. But there were occasional reportings and recordings of people who had traded usually with the Vikings.
Michael Hirst
#57. miles down the mountain in the morning and then making the long journey back up the hill at night. Life was hard. The townsfolk were barely literate and desperately poor and without much hope for economic betterment until word reached Roseto at the end
Malcolm Gladwell
#58. Fiction writing, and the reading of it, and book buying, have always been the activities of a tiny minority of people, even in the most-literate societies.
Paul Theroux
#59. To be rich you have to know what it is to be poor. Getting financially literate is part of the price you have to pay to become rich
Robert Kiyosaki
#60. It's an act of faith to be a writer in a post literate world.
Rita Mae Brown
#61. As parents we're not nearly as computer literate as our children are.
Phil McGraw
#62. It also makes the program more difficult to change because prose tends to be more tightly interconnected than code. This style is called literate programming. The
Marijn Haverbeke
#63. I think it's important for all culturally literate people to understand the technological substrate of new developments.
Hari Kunzru
#64. I like to think I'm generally accessible, but I give readers the benefit of the doubt of being reasonably culturally-literate.
Alonso Duralde
#65. The single most important condition for literacy learning is the presence of mentors who are joyfully literate people.
Shirley Brice Heath
#66. It's the post-literate generation that is most disturbing to a movie-maker. The explosions and the knifings. People like to go to what's hot and you can't get past a certain gross unless you involve children who go more than once.
Jack Nicholson
#67. Maturity is about how you live your life. It is possible to be theologically astute and be very immature. It is possible to be biblically literate and be in need of significant spiritual growth.
Paul David Tripp
#68. Success is like a "Tawaif" Noble, Artistic, Rich, literate, full of etiquette and of course an addiction.. Yet never loyal to anyone.. You have to be a "deserving slave" to get her ..
Himmilicious
#69. The literate man is a sucker for propaganda ... You cannot propagandize a native. You can sell him rum and trinkets, but you cannot sell him ideas.
Marshall McLuhan
#70. I am beguiled by your physical beauty, and I am moved by how head-over-heels in love with books you are. And nowhere else have I found such thoughtful and literate reportage on the state of the American soul, as that soul makes itself known in the books we write.
Kurt Vonnegut
#71. We are not quite conscious of the reason for our disdain when we refer to the illiterate past as wallowing in ignorance ... What divides us from them is the column of print. Theirs was a total culture involving all the senses, while ours is a culture concentrated in the literate eye.
Nick Joaquin
#72. My models were oral, were storytellers. Like my grandmothers and my aunts. It's true, a lot of people in my life were not literate in a formal sense, but they were storytellers. So I had this experience of just watching somebody spin a tale off the top of her head. I loved that.
Edwidge Danticat
#73. A good head and good heart are always a formidable combination. But when you add to that a literate tongue or pen, then you have something very special.
Nelson Mandela
#74. Language as a communication tool is the primary element from which literature is created. Even in pre-literate societies, it exists as songs, riddles, or epics that are chanted.
F. Sionil Jose
#75. My mother was a very literate person who had educated herself. She had an exceptional vocabulary.
Lynn Johnston
#76. You can't have people making decisions about the future of the world who are scientifically illiterate. That's a recipe for disaster. And I don't mean just whether a politician is scientifically literate, but people who vote politicians into office.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#77. To be scientifically literate is
to empower yourself to
know when someone else is
full of bullshit.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#78. I think satire is a luxury of literate middle-class people. People who are well fed and relatively secure in their beds can laugh at their troubles. They can enjoy sitcoms. For those who aren't quite so lucky, well, the irony might be lost on them.
Harold Ramis
#79. Graphic designers should be literate in graphic design history.
Being able to design well is not always enough. Knowing the roots
of design is necessary to avoid reinvention, no less inadvertent plagiarism.
Steven Heller
#80. In the South, it is different, they have a audience that is literate.
Ajay Devgan
#81. I want a part where I can use my own hair, my own voice, and maybe even be literate.
Judy Holliday
#82. Barack Obama is an elegant and literate man with a cosmopolitan sense of the world. He is widely read in philosophy, literature, and history - as befits a former law professor - and he has shown time and again a surprising interest in contemporary fiction.
Teju Cole
#83. I've been told that I am evil. I've been told that I am behind the persecution of millions of Americans. That I have encouraged hate toward gays. I've received both very brief and obscene messages, and very long and literate messages that tell me a vote for Crash was vote for homophobia.
Roger Ebert
#84. Years and years ago, I did a game based on 'Hitchhiker's Guide' with a company called Infocom, which was a great company. They were doing witty, intelligent, literate games based on text.
Douglas Adams
#85. There is an audience out there for literate films - slower, more observant, more human films, and they deserve to be made.
Alexander Payne
#86. I cannot locate any aestetic dignity in [Stephen] King's writing: his public could not sustain it, nor could he ... Art unfortunately is rarely the fruit of earnestness, and King will be remembered as a sociological phenomenon, an image of the death of the Literate Reader.
Harold Bloom
#87. I wanted a literate, socially intricate, and cosmopolitan world - something I could have fun destroying.
R. Scott Bakker
#88. I never heard of anyone who was really literate or who ever really loved books who wanted to suppress any of them.
Robertson Davies
#89. I am learning to get online myself, and I will have that down fairly soon, getting on myself. I dont expect to be a great communicator, I dont expect to set up my own blog, but I am becoming computer literate to the point where I can get the information that I need.
John McCain
#90. The possibility of genetic modification reminds me of the need for a scientifically literate electorate. Please stay tuned and vote!
Bill Nye
#91. Though I strived for spiritual and physical unity in all of Spain, I believed a truly great country, one that would endure for centuries, must be built on the foundation of a literate and well-rounded society.
C.W. Gortner
#92. In every literate society, learning to read is something of an initiation, a ritualized passage out of a state of dependency and rudimentary communication.
Alberto Manguel
#93. I've never understood how so many barely literate people read the Bible so much. It's hard. In the same way it surprises me that uneducated seamstresses all over the world can figure out how to put in sleeves and zippers.
Lucia Berlin
#94. Philosophically literate anthropomorphism is exactly what one would expect of any worldview which affirms that human beings are made in the image of God.
(from The God of the Bible and the God of the Philosophers)
Eleanore Stump
#95. I'm not computer literate. I e-mail. I know how to get on the Web, but I haven't crossed over into the internet world. I'm old-fashioned, I guess.
Katie Holmes
#96. I think to really be literate in nu shu you only need about 600 characters because it is phonetic. So you're able to then create many words out of one character.
Lisa See
#97. If all our children learn to do is read, they will not be literate.
David Warlick
#98. I'm a semi-literate farmer and hired killer. I ain't in the power game.
John Marston
#99. Being the family's literate one, my wife doesn't watch television much, preferring third-world novels, though she'll sit in now and then when I have on Jon Stewart.
Steve Erickson
#100. My problem is that the audience is more fiction-literate than ever. In Shakespeare's day, you probably expected to see a play once or twice in your life; today you experience four or five different kinds of fiction every day. So staying ahead of the audience is impossible.
Steven Moffat
